Red Auerbach, Who Built Basketball Dynasty, Dies at 89

Red Auerbach, who built the Boston Celtics into one of the greatest dynasties in sports, presiding over 16 National Basketball Association championship teams as a coach, general manager and club president, died Saturday in Washington. He was 89.

His death was announced by the Celtics. The cause was a heart attack, The Associated Press reported.

A presence in pro basketball for 60 years — his coaching career stretching back to the birth of the N.B.A. — Auerbach had a relentless will to win and he was a supreme judge of talent. He was a combative figure who always sought an edge, whether taunting his foes by lighting premature victory cigars on the bench or going jaw to jaw with the referees. Auerbach coached the Celtics to nine N.B.A. championships, eight of them consecutively from 1959 to 1966. He built another six championship teams as the Celtics’ general manager and oversaw a final one, in 1986, as the team’s president, a position he held at the time of his death.

When Auerbach turned over the Celtics’ coaching position to his star center Bill Russell in 1966, after 20 seasons as an N.B.A. coach and 16 of them in Boston, he was No. 1 in career victories with a record of 938-479. He was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1969 and he was named the greatest coach in N.B.A. history by the Professional Basketball Writers Association of America in 1980.

His nine N.B.A. championships as a coach have been equaled only by Phil Jackson, who won six with the Chicago Bulls and three with the Los Angeles Lakers.

Auerbach was also a pioneer in race relations. In 1950, his first season coaching the Celtics, he chose Chuck Cooper of Duquesne University as the first black player selected in an N.B.A. draft. In the 1963-64 season, the Celtics became the first N.B.A. team to start a game with an all-black lineup: Russell, K. C. Jones, Sam Jones, Tom Sanders and Willie Naulls.

When Auerbach named Russell as his coaching successor, it was the first time a black had become coach of a major American professional sports team.

A Brooklyn native, Auerbach took his place among the historical figures of New England on his 68th birthday, when a life-size statue of him was unveiled in Boston’s Faneuil Hall. Auerbach’s book “Basketball for the Player, the Fan and the Coach,” written in the early 1950’s, has been widely translated.

Auerbach was consumed by a quest to excel on the basketball court. It brought him something of a lonely existence. Because his wife, Dorothy, and their two daughters remained at the Auerbachs’ home in Washington during the long basketball winters, family life seldom encroached on his single-minded devotion to the sport.

“The game was my livelihood, my whole guts,” he said in “Red Auerbach: An Autobiography,” written with Joe Fitzgerald. As he put it: “I had to win. I wanted to be good in whatever I did. I wanted to be the very best teacher I possibly could be. I wanted to be the very best player I could possibly be. And I wanted to be the very best coach I could possibly be. Could I be a good coach and lose? To me, that’s like asking if a guy can be a good doctor even though his patients keep dying.”

Auerbach was often crusty and left no question as to who was the boss, although he considered his players’ suggestions on strategy. Insisting on team play over individual goals, he created an aura around the Celtics perhaps matched in American sports only by the Yankees’ mystique.

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Red Auerbachs cigar was a sure sign that the Boston Celtics had won. He was the teams general manager when the Celtics won the 1984 title.Credit
David M. Tenebaum/Associated Press

“He wanted everybody to know that when they put on a Celtics uniform, they were part of a tradition, something that was worth working for,” Wayne Embry, a former Celtics center and later an N.B.A. coach and executive, once told The Chicago Tribune. “He’d bark and growl at his players, but there was always a reason for it, and they got the message. On the Celtics, you accepted your role and took pride in being the best.”

Arnold Jacob Auerbach was born Sept. 20, 1917, in Brooklyn. His father was an immigrant from Russia who ran a dry-cleaning business. Everyone called him Red from the days when he helped in the family business. A 5-foot-10 guard, he played basketball at Eastern District High School in Brooklyn and at George Washington University.

His college coach, Bill Reinhart, who taught a fast-break style that few teams used in those days, proved to be a major influence on his tactics. Auerbach was soon teaching the game, coaching high school basketball in Washington.

After serving in the Navy during World War II, Auerbach made his pro coaching debut with the 1946-47 Washington Capitols in the inaugural season of the Basketball Association of America, the forerunner of the N.B.A. He coached the Capitols to the Eastern Division title with a 49-11 regular-season record, although the Philadelphia Warriors won the league championship. After three seasons with the Capitols, Auerbach coached the Tri-Cities Blackhawks, a team based in Illinois, for a season.

In 1950, Walter Brown, the founder and owner of the Celtics, an original N.B.A. franchise but a floundering team with little fan support, hired Auerbach as coach and gave him full authority over the basketball operations. Boston was a baseball and a hockey town, the Red Sox and the Bruins dominating the sports scene at a time when pro basketball was a poor relation to the college game.

Auerbach got off to a shaky start with the Boston news media and many local college basketball fans when he passed up a chance to select Bob Cousy, a star guard at Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., in the 1950 draft. He dismissed Cousy as a “local yokel” whose ball-handling brilliance clashed with his concepts of team play.

But Cousy became a Celtic when his Chicago Stags team folded before the season and Auerbach had to take him in a dispersal arrangement. Auerbach’s basketball acumen now began to pay off. He helped Cousy harness his talents, developing him into the rookie of the year. Cousy soon became a fan attraction rivaling only George Mikan, the Minneapolis Lakers center.

Auerbach picked up Ed Macauley, a fine frontcourt shooter, and he molded teams that went to the playoffs for six consecutive seasons. He had turned the Celtics’ fortunes around, but the team lacked one key ingredient — a center who could snare rebounds to touch off fast breaks, and frustrate opposing shooters with stifling defense.

Auerbach got his man when he worked a deal with the St. Louis Hawks to enable him to draft Russell in 1956 out of the University of San Francisco. Russell’s athleticism at a position formerly dominated by slow, plodding types complemented Cousy’s passing and shooting and the offensive skills of guard Bill Sharman, propelling the Celtics into a dynasty.

The Celtics won their first championship in 1957. Then, after losing to the Hawks in the 1958 finals, they won eight championships in a row.

“Well, there was a lot of luck involved,” Cousy told Jeff Greenfield in “The World’s Greatest Team: A Portrait of the Boston Celtics, 1957-69.”

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Red Auerbach in 2004.Credit
Marty Katz for the New York Times

Cousy, among the few people who referred to Auerbach as anything but Red, added: “But Arnold directed that luck. I give him much more credit for what he did after he won the first few championships than before. At the start of every year, the guys, particularly those who had been through the losing years, knew what it meant to win. And each year, they wanted it again and again.”

Russell paid tribute to Auerbach’s ability to handle his players as individuals while blending them into a speedy and defensively aggressive team. “Red had the greatest of ears,” Russell told USA Today in 2004. “After he talked to a player four times, he knew how to communicate with him. And that’s important. And you can’t treat everybody the same. If you treated everybody the same, they’d all get the same salary.

“Each year after I got in shape, Red didn’t have me scrimmage anymore. He said he’s not going to play me 46 minutes a game and wear me out in practice, too. So when we started scrimmaging, I’d go sit on the scorer’s table and drink tea.”

As John Havlicek put it in his foreword to Auerbach’s autobiography: “His greatest talent was knowing how to handle men and how to react to any game situation. He would curse us, coddle us, maybe even enrage us. Anything he thought would make us perform better.”

Auerbach’s combativeness bedeviled the referees. Game program in hand, he would harangue officials like Sid Borgia and Mendy Rudolph. In a 1963 Celtics-Knicks matchup, Rudolph slapped three technical fouls on Auerbach and threw him out. Auerbach retaliated by ordering his team off the floor for a while. And that was in an exhibition game.

Before a game in the 1957 finals in St. Louis, Auerbach angered the Hawks’ owner, Ben Kerner, who charged at him when the Celtics measured the height of the baskets to make sure they were within regulations. Auerbach won that dust-up by punching Kerner in the mouth.

Auerbach relished enraging opposing owners, coaches and players by lighting up his victory cigar in the closing moments of a game the Celtics had put away. Cousy once remembered how “Paul Seymour and Alex Hannum used to tell me they didn’t care about the N.B.A. championship; they just wanted to squash Arnold’s cigar.”

With Auerbach concentrating solely on his general manager’s role, the Celtics won N.B.A. championships in 1968, ’69, ’74, ’76, ’81 and ’84. One of his greatest coups was exploiting a loophole to draft Larry Bird in 1978, when Bird was a junior at Indiana State, still a year away from the N.B.A. His last championship team as general manager featured Bird, Robert Parish and Kevin McHale.

Auerbach relinquished day-to-day control of the Celtics before the 1984-85 season, turning the general manager’s role over to his assistant, Jan Volk, but retaining the club presidency he had held for the previous decade and a half. The Celtics captured the N.B.A. championship in 1986, but they have not won a league title since.

Auerbach is survived by his daughters, Nancy Auerbach Collins and Randy Auerbach, a granddaughter and three great-grandchildren. His wife, Dorothy, died in 2000.

In January 1985, Auerbach was honored at Boston Garden. Some 40 Celtics from four decades of Auerbach teams surrounded him in a circle on the parquet floor, and a banner was hoisted with a symbolic No. 2. (Banner No. 1 was for Walter Brown.)

Tom Heinsohn, a former star forward who often incurred Auerbach’s wrath, noticed a large sound system on the court set up for the ceremony. Heinsohn exclaimed, “They need a sound system for him?”

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